Have you ever tried to remember a friend’s phone number without opening your contact list? Do you rely on GPS to get you to your destinations? If so, you may be relying on technology at the risk of diminishing your critical thinking, an essential component of cognitive skills: mental processes that help us think, learn, and process information. In other words, instead of blindly accepting factoids, a critical thinker questions, analyzes the information, and evaluates it.
One study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft found that people who use AI regularly for basic, routine tasks will lose their ability for complex critical thinking. “Those who trusted the accuracy of the AI tools found themselves thinking less critically, while those who trusted the tech less used more critical thought when going back over AI outputs.”
“Skeptics worry that if education is increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence and automated responses, it will put technology in the driver’s seat and prompt formulaic approaches to learning.” But how and where are our students learning these skills? They aren’t usually assigned to any particular grade or subject. The first objective of education is to learn HOW to learn. For example, provide students with the opportunity to apply concepts rather than perform simple computation of formulas. Include charts and graphs that a student must analyze. In addition, providing students with opportunities to produce informational writing that analyzes, criticizes, or explains helps them engage in “”meta-cognition” or thinking about thinking.
By the way, I didn’t use AI to generate this article!
